Jet d'Eau de Genève

About this audio guide

This guide to the Jet d'Eau in Geneva starts with an offhand admission from a city engineer: the fountain everyone associates with Geneva began as an accident. It traces back to 1886, when a new hydraulic plant on the Rhone kept workshops running across town, and the pressure problem engineers faced every evening once those workshops closed for the day. You'll hear how passersby fell for what was meant to be a safety fix, and how the jet migrated to its current spot by 1891. Today two electric motors named after the mountains flanking the lake do the job that valve once did by accident.